


Nights on the Normandy

by PhantomThiefRobin



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 10:34:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18798607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhantomThiefRobin/pseuds/PhantomThiefRobin
Summary: After Virmire, Kaidan Alenko wanders the halls of the Normandy in search of distractions.





	Nights on the Normandy

Days on the Normandy aren’t really days. When you’re traveling through space, there’s no rhythm of a sun rising and setting – not even the artificial one like they have on the Citadel – to keep your internal clock running smoothly. A “day,” or at least what passes for one in the time between when you rise and when you next lie down to sleep, could be as long as 30 hours or as short as 12. But they were all exhausting.

Though the crew was often out of sync, there was always a lull for around a week (again, relative terms here) after some big mission where the whole crew was just constantly exhausted, and spent most hours asleep rather than awake. It’s one of the only times that the ship gets truly quiet.

After the Virmire mission, however, Kaidan Alenko found himself out of sync with the crew. He was constantly awake, and tried to fill his time with anything that might wear him out. At first, he just spent long hours in the training bay, hoping to physically exhaust himself. It had mixed results: he never managed to sleep for long, no matter how exhausted he made himself. He tried reading some of Ashley’s poetry books, but got frustrated with them. Tennyson is a little much for most, in fairness.

When that proved ineffective, he tried to learn new skills as a way to mentally tire himself. Ashley had always been a good cook, so he tried to learn how to make things for himself rather than rely on the Normandy’s so-so mess hall. He had always loved Italian food when he could manage to get real human cuisine. A failed lasagna later, he decided to stick to a basic spaghetti and meatball dish. It was passable, but to a soldier who had been eating space MREs for the last month, it was amazing.

And yet, it didn’t help him sleep. He seemed to have exhaust all his options. He had even gone to see Dr. Chakwas, hoping that she might be able to give him some sleep-aids, but to no avail.

“You know, there’s a natural sleep-aid that it pretty reliable. Or so I’m told,” Chakwas had told him, with a sly grin. Kaidan managed a slightly uncomfortable chuckle before sidling out of the infirmary.

In truth, Kaidan had tried that. Chakwas was right, of course, and in Kaidan’s experience, he was out like a light within minutes of finishing. Usually, of course, he had somebody to help him with that. For the past year, that somebody had been Ashley. Even during the days on the Normandy when Kaidan would find himself out of sync with most of the crew, Ashley was always reliable company, keeping just as strange hours as the headstrong soldier. But Virmire was Virmire, and now Kaidan was alone.

Of course, being alone didn’t preclude the kind of sleep-aid Chakwas had terrifyingly alluded to. Kaidan, however, found it hard to do even that. It brought back strong memories of Lieutenant Williams, and, surprisingly, memories of dead former lovers aren’t much of a turn on. Even with Kaidan’s not-so-secret stash of visual aids (Commander Shepard had been known to borrow them, especially given Liara’s inability to understand the physical dimension of human relationships), he found himself unable to be satisfied.

So instead of sleeping like the rest of the crew, he wandered the halls of the Normandy for hours on end.

As it happened, one day he was walking by the engine room – the lower decks were Kaidan’s preferred haunts – when he heard a clattering come from within. The room was still dark; Kaidan couldn’t tell if anybody was inside. He drew the pistol he kept on his person and gripped it tightly, briefly wondering if he should go wake Joker before investigating. The door slid open as he approached, and he banished such thoughts from his mind – he could handle this.

Inside, the engine room looked almost excruciatingly normal. Kaidan flipped the light switch (well, touched the panel that controlled the lights – switches were phased out after the First Contact War following the new regulations imposed on military spacecraft) and glanced around. He saw a few tools spilled out on the floor, and approached them cautiously. He rounded the corner and aimed his pistol –

“Alenko!”

It was Garrus. The turian was sitting on the floor, with a nearby control panel open and clearly undergoing some form of maintenance. Kaidan exhaled finally and lowered his pistol.

“Vakarian? Christ, you scared the shit out of me. Why were you working with the lights off?”

“I was having trouble sleeping, so I came down here to do some, uh, calibrations on the new engine block. I didn’t want to disturb anyone, so I kept quiet about it.” Garrus very quickly stood and brushed himself off. Kaidan watched as the turian hastily shoved all the tools he had spilled back into the box, and then kicked the control panel closed. “I was just finishing up when you walked in.”

“Uh huh. Knocked over your toolbox?”

“What’s that? Oh, oh yeah. I dropped my uh, my wrench, that I was using. To, you know, calibrate.”

Kaidan stared at him as he holstered his pistol. Garrus scratched the back of his head absent-mindedly. Kaidan glanced down and saw that the zipper on Garrus’ flight suit was half open. He pointedly looked back up and met Garrus’ gaze. Garrus looked down, saw what Kaidan had seen, and chuckled slightly.

“Calibrations,” Kaidan deadpanned.

“Calibrations.”

Neither of them said anything.

“This is… awkward, Alenko.”

Kaidan was thinking. Garrus swore he saw the faintest hint of a smile on Kaidan’s face, which seemed to have turned an almost imperceptibly redder shade.

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Now it was Garrus’ turn to stare uncomfortably.

“You hungry?”

Garrus considered the question, and what the question could possibly mean. He thought about Tali’Zorah, and wondered what she would think. But he WAS hungry, and the mess hall had been his next destination anyway.

“I could eat.”

* * *

Garrus found himself in Kaidan’s quarters some twenty minutes later. This was very far from his expectations.

Kaidan had insisted that they share a meal. The crew had been asleep so often lately that Kaidan had very rarely had opportunity to interact with people – he hadn’t seen Shepard in what felt like weeks. He was going to take advantage of any opportunity to spend time with another living creature who could reciprocate conversation. Also other things. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Garrus was seated at Kaidan’s very small table while the human busied himself with various pots and pans on his stove. All of the cookbooks he could find in the database were very old and outdated, so he had to use the old tech to cook rather than the fancy new future technology. Let’s go with that.

He was making spaghetti and meatballs, which he insisted was an amazing dish, and Garrus had no reason to doubt that. But he also couldn’t eat it, because, as Kaidan seemed unaware, turian biology was based on dextro-amino acids rather than on levo-amino acids, as human biology was. Eating that food would be essentially poisoning himself. But Garrus, clearly seeing how much having somebody to talk to was lifting Kaidan’s spirits – and knowing that Kaidan of all the crew needed his spirits lifted the most – was politely playing along.

He was growing more and more uncertain, however, of how he was going to pretend to eat the spaghetti without letting Kaidan know that of course he couldn’t eat it. Kaidan placed a plate with a surprisingly modest portion of pasta and sauce in front of Garrus, before sitting across from him with his own plate.

There was a candle lit in between the two. Garrus was surprised by Kaidan’s ostensible desperation for companionship. He smiled at the human, and picked up a fork obligatorily. Kaidan returned the smile, and began to devour his own plate.

Garrus slowly twirled some of the pasta around with his fork, his mind racing, trying to find a way to make it seem that he was eating the pasta. But with Kaidan so close to him, his options were limited. The turian’s best plan involved just holding pasta in his mouth, below his tongue, but not swallowing it, and then excusing himself to the bathroom to deposit it into the toilet. It wouldn’t be good for the ship’s plumbing, and he’d have to excuse himself numerous times, but it was the best option he had.

Until, that is, Kaidan suddenly got up and attended to the remaining pots and pans.

“Fuck, I left the extra sauce on the burner!” he said as much to himself as to Garrus. With Kaidan’s back turned, Garrus knew that this was his chance. He grabbed a thick fistful of the pasta, and, not having thought this far in advance, shoved it into the pocket of his flight suit. Kaidan was still attending to the mess he had made, so Garrus shoved another fistful of pasta into the other pocket. Thinking he had made enough of a dent in the pasta as to be socially acceptable, he stood up and brought the plate to the sink to help Kaidan wash up.

In Kaidan’s rush to clean to get back to his pasta, he was being profoundly unclean. He was splashing dish water all over the place. With Garrus now trying to help by washing his own dish, it became a slight clusterfuck, and Kaidan ended up spilling the remaining sauce all over his own flight suit.

He backed away, and he and Garrus had a silent moment where they both processed the absurdity of what had just happened. After a while, Kaidan chuckled, and looked up at Garrus.

“Well, I guess I can’t wear this anymore.”

Garrus looked on in half-horror, half-fascination as Kaidan removed the bottom of his flight suit, revealing the surprising fact that he wasn’t wearing any undergarments. He couldn’t stop himself from darting his eyes downward to look at Kaidan’s exposed, semi-erect penis.

Garrus had never seen a human penis before, and as such had no metrics with which to mentally evaluate Kaidan’s. He had no way of knowing that Kaidan was actually fairly well endowed, or that his testicles and scrotum were disproportionately small in comparison to his penis, or that Kaidan’s penis had not been circumcised. Not that Garrus knew what circumcision was. He was not up to date on male human anatomy.

Kaidan seemed remarkably pleased with himself, and Garrus was very aware that this had been his plan all along. So he was unsurprised, but no less horrified, when Kaidan tossed the dish water remaining in the saucepan he was holding on Garrus’ flight suit.

“Oh no, I guess you’ll have to take your flight suit off too,” Kaidan deadpanned. Garrus almost audibly groaned, but had frozen up and was mentally unable to move. Kaidan approached, and with a swift tug, pulled the bottom of Garrus’ flight suit off.

When Kaidan glanced back up, he was met with a full view of turian cloaca. Because turians don’t have penises, not that Kaidan had ever paused to consider that.

Perhaps more surprising than the reveal of a cloaca (instead of the expected penis) was the ludicrous amount of spaghetti that was now spilling out of Garrus’ pockets. Kaidan looked down at the spaghetti, and then back at up at Garrus.

“Not what you were expecting?”


End file.
